How Remote Technology Helped M&E Adapt, Grow Beyond 2021

The signs of regular life are finally starting to show! In fact, the broadcasting world is showing very bright signs of normalcy. Early this month, NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, selected Avid® to provide the content production and media management platform, tools, and solutions for production of the much-anticipated event in Japan.

Not only are we excited to have major live sporting events back for 2021 but also to congratulate Avid – Teradici’s Advantage Partner – for receiving such a well-deserved distinction. Over the past two decades, Avid has supported NBC in its Olympics broadcast bringing state-of-the-art coverage to viewers back at home. The US network will also use Avid Nexis shared storage, Media Composer Ultimate and the Media Composer Cloud VM option to enable its team to connect and collaborate in real time for content production and delivery.

The Significance of 2021 for Media & Entertainment

2020 was a year that saw all live entertainment venues such as theatrical and music tours cancelled, sporting events were either postponed, canceled entirely, or went on with millions of empty stadium seats. As a result, the broadcast, and media industry, like every other sector, felt the negative impact particularly when it comes to events, advertising revenues and media technology investments.

However, this pause meant that most consumers were left reaching for their TV and gaming remotes to pass the time.  During the pandemic people saw more of their streaming services, gaming consoles and TV networks than their friends and family – the entertainment industry’s growth was directly bolstered by our time spent at home in front of the tube – bittersweet for some.

Remote Editing Solutions for Continued Production

The question early on was, “how do film productions continue to create content while keeping their employees safe at home?”

Like in the movies, heroes are needed when impossible tasks need to be accomplished. Avid focused on enabling content creators to create, collaborate and distribute intellectual property across distributed teams enabling remote workflows to allow the entertainment industry to maintain business continuity.  Tools such as Media Composer Cloud VM and cloud remote had been available for several years, but it was not until the pandemic that media companies leveraged these tools and the virtualized environments they had invested in to enable a distributed workforce.  These tools when combined with Teradici PCoIP enabled secure remote access to on premises Avid video editing software and Avid production environments which allowed media companies to quickly pivot to enable work from home because of the mandatory lockdowns during the pandemic.  Avid also had users turn to the cloud during the pandemic and specifically Avid’s Edit on Demand, the company’s first SaaS offering for turn key editorial in the cloud, which allowed users to add capacity in a matter of hours, not days, with pay as you go options, taking advantage of the elasticity and scalability of the cloud for allowing distributed teams to work on the same project from anywhere there is an internet connection.  Avid’s preeminent customer community uses Avid’s comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to create, distribute and monetize the most watched, loved and listened to media in the world.

Similarly, during the pandemic Teradici focused on making Teradici Cloud Access Software, an ultra-secure feature-rich software solution, that is affordable, and available to broadcast studios faced with business continuity challenges. This effort saw Teradici honored with an Engineering Emmy® Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development from the Television Academy – all for accommodating the needs of content creators working remotely.

Content remains the industry’s crown jewel which is why Avid and Teradici continue to collaborate to help keep our customers’ content production lines always on and available.  Post-production staff, visual effects artists, and video editors can continue to create, collaborate, and deliver compelling content regardless of whether they are accessing Avid tools on premises or in the cloud.

It's nothing short of extraordinary how, through innovation, ingenuity, and determination the industry continued to broadcast news, sports, television, films and even live entertainment to audiences across the globe. To learn more about how Avid and Teradici work together to enable content creators, check out our joint whitepaper, Distributed Production Environments and How Cloud Technology Will Reshape Media Creation and Delivery.

To learn more about Avid Edit on Demand, watch our on-demand webinar here.